Cleaving A Legacy - The Future of Card Cleaver

This year I bought and destroyed about 15,000 trading cards. I write this message as we receive the news that potentially 6-12 months of trading card history has been lost by the server crash. My statistics may not show this data anymore, but I wanted my obsessive nonsense recorded for posterity.

I destroy cards for fun. It’s been satisfying seeing my numbers of purchases and destructions jump by hundreds a day, as I seek out card for junk value (or below) I can get my hands on. There’s lots of reasons I do it, including connecting hidden gems to potential buyers - but primarily it’s about my “un-collection”. A list of cards that were not valued, and ripe for deletion. I don’t play the card game quite like most others, and it’s how I’ve come to enjoy NationStates. Potentially facing the loss of that data terrifies me. Although what is at risk is immaterial – I have no collections maintained, unlike many users – I’d be deeply upset to have a black hole in my data. I’ve been thinking a lot about it and how I’d navigate a post-snap card market, as I’m sure many users have been.

We all know that this must end someday. I get tired, this site takes its last breath and the servers collapse on themselves, that RSI that’s been bugging me since the Wonders event gets worse, something will happen to end the party eventually. Everything I’ve done will eventually be for nothing. Hell, everything EVERYONE here has done will be gone someday. The last 10 days of downtime have brought this into light, for sure.

Surely we know that going into this, don’t we? We do it anyway because we’re passionate about this strange little minigame on this odd little website. To be a card farmer involves the Sisyphean act of operating thousands of accounts to get a digital card with no real world value. Forming collections can take months of effort tracking and negotiating deals, and we have seen fantastic collections come into being – one of my favourites being Dune Cat’s S3 Uncommons – tens of thousands of cards collected for the hell of it. It’s art. True art is temporary, and if there’s a card game to play here on this website, I want to be a rat gnawing on the corner of the great tapestry for as long as it exists.

Card Cleaver will continue in this new era. No way in hell you’re getting rid of me that easily.